Tyco trolley to Ottawa transfer trolley: Shell surgery

My usual practice is to put off major modifications until I'm completely satisfied with my plan. This time I didn't delay as long as usual, pulled out the razor saw, and reduced the body to a 6 window job before I had time to chicken out.

You can see the section I removed to the right and above the parts of the shell I'm going to glue back together.

My cuts were just outside the lines as my plan was to file and sand the rough cut pieces into their final shapes.

At this time I also ground out a molding sprue that was inside the shell's roof, just below the old mounting point for the trolley pole. The sprue was visible through the clerestory windows and looked unsightly, so it had to go. The resulting hole was then filled with Perfect Plastic Putty both inside and out.

Here are the two pieces after sanding and before gluing together. You can see I sanded a bit too much off the bottom of the larger piece, but that can be corrected with putty.

Also, the end of the trolley where the joint will be is a little thicker that the other end, so the body is slightly asymmetrical. This was done for strength, and to leave the end window frames intact - for perfect symmetry I would have had to do some cutting and filing on the window frames that I don't think would have turned out too good. 

Here it is glued together, before putty and final smoothing.

The book Ottawa's Streetcars tells me the prototype was 28' long, and my little model measures 27', so not too bad. 

Now it's on to some 'precision' filling, filing, and getting the joint to disappear.

And doing some research into figuring out what colour this thing was!